August 5, 2007

Jackie French, the author of The Secret World of Wombats (The Amazing World of Wallabies will be out early next year from Angus and Robertson/Harper Collins), gives great advice for maintaining a wildlife-friendly garden in this linked SMH article.

We have an orange tree and a lemon tree, which attracts gangs of cockatoos on their end of the day forage, and possums at night. The cockatoos strew the lawn with half-eaten oranges — they're too good for lemons — discarded after holding the orange in their claw, peeling off the top of the skin with their beaks, and then ripping into the contents like drunks at a cocktail party. After its fill, the cockatoo flies off with a satisfied screech and a squawk... and a new replacement instantly appears in flash of white wings, sparing the tree no relief. At night, the possums race up and down the roof — they get on one end along the single strand of telephone wire coming in off the street — shoot across the roof to launch themselves off the roof onto the lemon tree, and from there, onto the orange tree. Their tell-tail signs are the hollowed out orange skins still attached to the branch. If you are going to encourage them into your garden you need to discourage them from getting into your roof. You don't want to try growing tomatoes either.

So there is a lot of noise day and night; flocks of cockatoos of the move can be deafening and possums are loud spitters and hissers when being territorial, and the nocturnal possum fights can be as disturbing as cats on heat.